Life asked death, "Why do people love me but hate you?"
Death responded, "Because you are a beautiful lie and I am a painful truth."
--- Unknown

Tuesday, August 02, 2011

Dog Days

We finally made it to the beach on the Atlantic side of Florida after living a mere 45 minute drive from it for nearly a year. We of course got broiled to well-done; either our sunscreen is too old, or it isn't water-proof, but in any case we are both sporting some rather unusual pink and red blotches right now. The beach was nice; a county park on the Ponce de Leon inlet with access to the ocean and the inlet all within a couple minutes walk of the parking area. There are bathrooms, a place to hose off the salt water, several small pavilions with grills, boardwalks, etc. Clean, well-maintained and best of all, not all that crowded. We got there early and nearly had the place to ourselves for the first few hours, but even when the parking lot filled up, the beaches were never the shoulder-to-shoulder crowded like some of the more well-known beaches. It's only five bucks for a day pass or we can get an annual pass if we find we're going over there frequently. As usual, we have photos, but they are still on the camera. They may migrate to our Flickr page at some point, but I don't know when I'll have the time to do it.

The main beach on the ocean side didn't allow dogs, but the smaller beach on the inlet side did. Naturally that's where we spent most of our time so we could play with other people's dogs. The people next to us had a young boxer and some sort of puppy. (It was still a fuzzy, yellow butterball; too young to look like any kind of breed yet, but may have been a golden retriever given how well it did in the water.) The next group of people down the beach had an older dog that looked like a blond lab gone nearly white. He came over to play with the other two in the water. People and dogs all got tired and came back on shore and flopped out for a nap. The puppy got bored with all the laying around and found an empty water bottle that made a really cool sound when he chewed it. The boxer decided he wanted to play with it, took it away from the puppy, and held it just out of reach while crunching it in his mouth. Those of you with children know exactly what was going on. The lab came over to intervene on behalf of the puppy and the boxer took off down the beach with the water bottle looking over his shoulder with the classic "Nya nya! You can't catch me!" expression. The lab stood watching him for a second, then casually strolled over to the open cooler that had the boxer's water in it, unloaded about a gallon of piss right into the cooler, then sauntered back over to his people and laid down. We nearly died laughing.

After a weekend of fun-in-the-sun, it's back to the grind with Debbie selling cruises and me plowing through the tax code. If I can keep on task (rather than spending time doing stuff like this), I should be ready for part one of the test by the end of the week. Then I get to do it all over again. And again. I'm planning to have this all wrapped up by the end of October.

Meanwhile, our Congress has taken another giant step towards turning the US into one of the PIIGS. Not that the debt ceiling means, or has ever meant, anything. The original idea was it would prevent Congress from doing exactly what it has done for the last four decades; spend like a drunken sailor with someone else's American Express Black Card. But constitutionally, no session of Congress can impose anything on a future session of Congress, so the whole thing was a majestic fraud from day one, just like Social Security. At least with this particular bit of Kabuki theater out of the way, our "leaders" can get on with the next act where they pretend that lowering the annual increase in federal spending from 8% to 6% is somehow cutting the budget. I, like millions of other Americans, can only dream of struggling with those kinds of "cuts" in our family budgets. And yet we keep sending in the clowns. (Or would that be kuroko?)

Of more immediate interest to us is our newest friend, Emily. She doesn't look to be anything more than a tropical storm and is expected to stay off-shore, but we could get some substantial rain over the weekend if the forecast holds up. Whoo hoo! Our first tropical storm!

And I need to get to work. First topic for today: Sale of principal residence.